Experts look to bullet casing messages for hints on motive as Trump hits out at left over Kirk shooting

3 hours ago 4

By Andrew Hay and Brad Brooks

September 14, 2025 — 12.37pm

Orem, Utah: US President Donald Trump has furthered the blame for Charlie Kirk’s death on his political opponents even as investigators and experts try to determine the motive for the shooting and the meaning of messages inscribed on bullet cases found at the scene.

Kirk, a conservative influencer and staunch Trump ally, was killed on Wednesday (Thursday AEST) by a single rifle shot fired from a rooftop while he was engaging in public debate before 3000 people gathered in a courtyard at Utah Valley University. A bolt-action rifle was found nearby.

Christopher Bradford, right, and daughter, Neriah Bradford, pay their respects at a memorial for Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University on Friday.

Investigators found messages engraved into four bullet casings, which included references to memes, video game in-jokes and a well-known anti-fascist song. One casing, according to the arrest affidavit, had been inscribed: “If you read This, you are GAY Lmao”.

After a 33-hour manhunt, 22-year-old trade school student Tyler Robinson was arrested on Thursday night at his parents’ house 420 kilometres away after relatives and a family friend allegedly alerted authorities that Robinson had implicated himself in the crime.

He is being held on suspicion of aggravated murder, Utah governor Spencer Cox said, and will probably be formally charged next week over an act of violence widely seen as a foreboding inflection point in US politics.

Speaking to NBC News on Saturday (Sunday AEST), Trump did not hold back from again blaming his political opponents for the killing.

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump attend a ceremony at the Pentagon to commemorate the anniversary of the September 11 attacks on Thursday.

“I’d like to see it (the nation) heal,” NBC quoted Trump as saying in a brief telephone interview. “But we’re dealing with a radical left group of lunatics, and they don’t play fair and they never did.”

State records show Robinson was a registered voter but not affiliated with any political party. A relative told investigators that Robinson had grown more political in recent years and had once discussed with another family member their dislike for Kirk and his viewpoints, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.

An expert on democracy and security said it was hard to read too much into the messages left on the shell casings recovered. One of the inscriptions read: “hey fascist! CATCH!” followed by a combination of directional arrows – an apparent reference to a sequence of button presses that unleashes a bomb in a popular video game.

“It’s very hard to map a political ideology on this mishmash of video game references and hints of different internet subcultures,” Emerson Brooking, a fellow at think tank the Atlantic Council and a former cyber-policy adviser at the US Defence Department, told the New York Times.

Mugshots of Tyler Robinson, who has been identified as the gunman in the Charlie Kirk shooting.

Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the symbology found on the bullet casings could also suggest the shooter had affiliation with the so-called Groyper movement, associated with far-right activist and commentator Nick Fuentes.

“It’s an eclectic ideological movement marked by video game memes, anti-gay, Nick Fuentes white supremacy, irony,” she said. “It certainly leans right, but it is quite eclectic.”

Fuentes, who has called Kirk his foe and adversary, has denied any link between his movement and the killing, which he condemned.

Far-right activist and podcaster Nick Fuentes.

“My followers and I are currently being framed for the murder of Charlie Kirk by the mainstream media based on literally zero evidence,” he said in a post to X.

Kleinfeld said that, in some respects, “the ideological beliefs of the shooter don’t matter. What matters is how they’re taken by society. And if our society chooses to keep pointing fingers, whether the person turns out to be right, left or just unstable, then the violence will grow from the pointing of fingers, regardless of the act itself.”

Many Republicans, including Trump, have been quick to lash out at the political left, accusing liberals of fomenting anti-conservative vitriol that would encourage a kindred spirit to cross the line into violence – even as the president and his allies routinely invoke violent imagery against their opponents.

In a video address to a protesting crowd in London overnight, billionaire Elon Musk said left-wing movements should be held responsible for the assassination of Kirk.

A silver Dodge is towed from the family home of Tyler Robinson in Utah on Friday.

“There’s so much violence on the left, with our friend Charlie Kirk getting murdered in cold blood this week and people on the left celebrating it openly,” he said. “The left is the party of murder and celebrating murder.”

Within hours of the killing on Wednesday, with the suspect still at large, Trump was also blaming the “radical left”.

He vowed to identify those responsible for political violence and the “organisations that fund it and support it”, sparking fears among Trump’s critics and liberal organisations that the president will use the killing to crack down on left-leaning institutions.

Political strategist Jess O’Connell, who co-founded the Democracy Security Project, told The New York Times that such organisations have been on alert for security threats since Trump took office but his public targeting of the left over Kirk’s death had escalated their fears.

Donald Trump shakes hands with Kirk during a Generation Next White House forum in Washington in 2018.

“The president has been looking for anything he can use to justify a big crackdown on his perceived political enemies that includes not just non-profits but civic and cultural organisations,” she said. “It’s a danger to all of us when the president picks sides on who we should mourn.”

The killing has stirred outrage among Kirk’s supporters, some of whom have taken to the internet in organised efforts to try to have anyone minimising or mocking his death fired from their jobs; Reuters has so far tallied 15 dismissals or suspensions tied to comments about the killing.

In Utah, Cox called Kirk’s murder a “watershed in American history” and compared it to the rash of US political assassinations of the 1960s. He declined to discuss possible motives for the killing.

Kirk’s murder comes amid the most sustained period of US political violence in decades. Reuters has documented more than 300 cases of politically motivated violent acts across the ideological spectrum since Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Candles are left at a vigil for Charlie Kirk in Provo, Utah, on Friday.

Trump himself has survived two attempts on his life, one that left him with a grazed ear during a campaign event in July 2024 and another two months later foiled by federal agents.

Democrats have fallen victim, too. In April, an arsonist broke into Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s residence and set it on fire while the family was inside.

In June, a gunman posing as a police officer in Minnesota murdered Democratic state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and shot Democratic state Senator John Hoffman and his wife.

Reuters

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